One of Shakespeare's most insubstantial concoctions — at least as far as its story line is concerned — Love's Labour's Lost would seem an apt Bardic vehicle to toy with: It doesn't have the sacrosanct air of the tragedies or the histories, and it's replete with the sort of bawdy humor that makes it catnip to collegiate theatrical groups. (At one point one of the play's four heroes, Berowne, actually refers to another character as "some dick," hyuck, hyuck, hyuck.) But like all of Shakespeare's plays, it's filled with rich language and profound subtext, much of which is liable to get lost if one gets too playful with the text. Director-adapter-costar Kenneth Branagh, who knows a bit about Shakespeare (Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing), doesn't exactly fall into that trip with his film version of the play — the Shakespearean language he's deigned to squeeze into this 95-minute movie is spoken pretty much as written. No, Branagh falls into a trap that's much more dire — call it the postmodern-pastiche trap.

Apparently inspired by the likeso Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You (but garnering results more akin to Peter Bogdanovich's woefully ill-conceived At Long Last Love), he's decided to wed Shakespeare's text with texts by the likes of Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, Jerome Kern et al. Setting the play in pre-WWII Europe, he's made a damn musical out of the thing. And in so doing he manages to diminish and trivialize both Shakespeare and the great songwriters the production puports to celebrate. Will's trenchant, ironic observations on the nature of romantic love are rendered as limp as a wet noodle, or something else, even; the songs, too, wilt. The shadow of fatalistic melancholy that hangs over the "The Way You Look Tonight" just ceases to exist when it's performed in this context. In fact, all of the great tunes in the film — "Cheek to Cheek," "They Can't Take That Away From Me," even "I'd Rather Charleston," for Christ's sake, are presented in precisely the way that made the baby-boomer generation consider such classics "square." One might as well be watching Lawrence Welk reruns. The fresh-faced cast — including Matthew Lillard, Alicia Silverstone, Adrian Lester, and Alessandro Nivola (whose new found ability to shave is a heartening development) — is game but painfully misguided; among his other sins, Branagh has the bad taste to deliver the film's only performance.